CNN takes heat for action, inaction

[vicman]

CNN takes heat for action, inaction

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/20030414/ts_usatoday/5066408

Peter Johnson USA TODAY

CNN came under attack Sunday on two fronts.

An admission by CNN's chief news executive that he kept quiet for years about government atrocities in Iraq (news - web sites) -- including those against his own journalists -- raised questions about whether CNN committed an ethical transgression: trading silence for access.

And a French media watchdog group says CNN is setting a ''dangerous precedent'' by having a team in Iraq traveling with an armed guard.

Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) made the comments after an incident in the northern Iraqi town of Tikrit in which a security guard with CNN's Brent Sadler fired his machine gun at a checkpoint when the convoy came under gunfire.

Media groups generally stay away from hiring armed guards, saying it can increase confusion. But because Iraq is so particularly dangerous, ''you do what you have to do to protect your people,'' CNN spokesman Matthew Furman says.

In The New York Times Friday, Eason Jordan wrote that CNN never reported that an Iraqi cameraman working for CNN was tortured because it ''would have almost certainly have gotten him killed and put him or his family and co-workers at grave risk.''

He also wrote that he never reported that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s eldest son, Uday, had told him in 1995 that he planned to kill two of his brothers-in-law who had defected as well as the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. ''I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting,'' Jordan wrote. (He did tell King Hussein, who ignored it, and a few months later Uday ''lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.'')

''I'm disturbed by (Jordan's actions). It really took the wind out of me,'' Bill Kovach, head of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, said Sunday. ''There were probably strategic business decisions about CNN's relationship with the government, but this seems to me to be allowing the ethics of other endeavors to trump the ethics of journalism: to seek the truth and make it available.''

In Saturday's New York Post, columnist Eric Fettmann wrote: ''It's like saying that the best interests of journalism would have justified suppressing stories on the Holocaust in order to keep a U.S. news bureau in Berlin to tell Nazi Germany's side.''

In his own defense, CNN's Jordan said Sunday, ''I am at peace with myself knowing that I did the right thing and not put the lives of innocent people at risk.''

To anyone who accuses CNN of going soft on the Iraqi government now in tatters, Jordan said: ''No one was kicked out of Iraq more than CNN was. We got thrown out again and again for our tough reporting.''

Harvard media analyst Alex Jones said Sunday that he sympathized with what Jordan went through because dealing with foreign governments -- or dictatorships -- is not easy for any news outfit. ''Protecting your people always has to be the prime consideration.''

Good journalism always has ''tension between judgment and integrity,'' Jones said, and is a ''very hard thing'' for anyone not in Jordan's shoes to ''pass judgment on.''

[siceone]

I heard about what this guy did it's despicable they are supposed the report the truth